HouseCanary | Reviews and Pricing | 2024
HouseCanary has Property Explorer, a comparative market analysis (CMA) tool. The company also provides an AVM, mass appraisal tools, and real estate data aggregation. Their primary customers are institutional customers like corporate landlords and lenders. HouseCanary has partnered directly with Nextdoor to provide the growing social network with its own home value estimate.
House Canary was founded in 2013 by Jeremy Sicklick and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with offices in San Antonio, TX, and Boulder, CO.
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Use HouseCanary if…
- You already have a listing presentation that knocks it out of the park, but want a strong, data-centric and easy-to-use CMA to add to it
- You are a tech guy and need to repurpose home value data using APIs
Skip HouseCanary if…
- You’re wanting a one-size-fits-all, total listing presentation CMA package (consider Cloud CMA)
- You don’t want to pay that much and can settle for a more cumbersome and lightweight option (consider RPR)
- You’re old school and want something simple and familiar (consider ToolkitCMA)
View Other Real Estate CMA Software
Best Features
Robust Market Information
What is the trendline for the real estate market? Is it a buyer’s or seller’s market? How much inventory?
House Canary pulls this information for the Value Reports. Real estate data is what House Canary does.
HouseCanary emphasizes its AVM that it generates itself, and then allows for you to adjust that AVM based on the condition of the home.
The Property Explorer CMA report includes this local data for you.
You can also use their Data Explorer to find local market insights to share with agents or your customers on social media.
Rental Comps
HouseCanary goes further than other CMA software and tries to include rental estimates. This is handy when pitching to a seller who is still trying to decide whether renting or selling is a better option.
You can also put together your own rental CMA, though it is limited to rental comps on the MLS. Your area may or may not have many rental comps to go on.
Good MLS Coverage
HouseCanary has most of the major MSAs and MLSs covered, with the exception of New Mexico for some reason. Chances are you will find it useful for your neck of the woods.
Techie Friendly
You can pull all the data from the reports with an API. That means you can repurpose the data however you like.
For example, if you have your own enterprise CMA software, or a customer-facing website, you can grab HouseCanary’s data but in your own format or purposes. This is very techie and probably doesn’t apply to you. But still kinda cool.
They are very generous in providing all the raw information used to populate their CMA tool in a csv format if needed.
Biggest Pitfalls
Not Optimized for Realtors
Real estate agents are not HouseCanary’s primary customers. They optimize their software for acquisitions organizations for single-family rental (SFR) institutional investors like Invitation Homes, or mortgage lenders. They want customers who buy in bulk.
Their reports have some pretty neat information and can be used effectively in listing presentations and CMAs. But it does not include some of the features you might look for in a CMA software like custom pages or templates selling you and your services.
Clumsy Adjustments
I can make adjustments to comps, e.g. subtract $5000 on a comp that has an extra bedroom. But I have to do it manually.
I wish there were a CMA tool that allowed me to implement an adjustment matrix of my own to apply automatically to all the comps I selected!
Or, even better, use all that fancy AI technology to recommend adjustments for different features. Clearly they have hedonic regressions and ML models behind the scenes for their AVM. Just share those adjustments in consumer-facing adjustments that we Realtors could then edit if we disagree. It would make our CMAs so much more powerful!
Expensive
You pay per CMA in groups, and even then the cheapest plan comes in at more than what most agents spend on their CRM per month.
HouseCanary Pricing*
- $10/CMA
- Discounts for more numerous CMAs/mo
- Custom enterprise pricing available
HouseCanary isn’t cheap, especially if you are doing numerous CMAs that seldom turn into deals (as when working with investors). It costs $10/report.
*This is current to the best of my knowledge at the time of this writing. Contact the vendor directly to check current prices, discounts, and terms.
My Recommendation
I’ve used HouseCanary in the course of my employment with Single Family Rental (SFR) companies.
It’s a very usable platform with reasonably intuitive filtering and comp selection UX, and has some useful market information you can include when pitching to sellers. I personally overcome some of the few things it doesn’t do (home price appreciation (HPA) adjustments, automatic amenity adjustments, etc) by pulling the csv file out on each home and inputting it into my own CMA Excel. I appreciate that it lets me do this!
As their main focus is neither agents nor listing presentations, they have less to offer than other tools on that front. You will need to piece together the rest of your listing presentation and materials elsewhere. I think that is a critical flaw that will hold it back from adoption among residential sales brokerages, when you can get that for similar prices with software like CloudCMA.
Though very neatly and professionally presented, the reports can be a bit heavy on the data and analytics. Be sure to understand the content and be prepared to explain it before you hand it to a prospective seller or you risk looking silly.
HouseCanary Videos
